Cinema Scope Online

Welcome to Cinema Scope online, a regularly updated web supplement to the print version of Cinema Scope. In the magazine, we have a limited amount of space to pack the world of Cinema As We Know It in. So, for example, while we might cover the major premiere festivals in print, in the updates you’ll find more festival reports, as well as articles on retrospectives and the like taking place in our immediate and general global jurisdiction. This is a Canadian film magazine based in Toronto, and that’s an important part of the mandate.

By Andrew Tracy It would be both needless and unfair to criticize Craig McCall’s new documentary Cameraman: The Life & Work of Jack Cardiff for its relative lack of cinematic imagination, no matter that it’s all the more ironic in light of its subject’s masterly command of the medium. Though the imperative of paying deserved [...]More →

By Robert Koehler Well before Sundance 2011, it’s been a rough time for America. The Tea Party/Palin acolytes were increasingly scared of the black man in the White House, and with a compliant GOP gave him a “shellacking.” Gun nuts drifted away from the firing range and started shooting at elected officials in Tucson, eliciting [...]More →

By Michael Sicinski If I were a betting man, I’d have put everything I had on Thomas Arslan’s In the Shadows (ably parsed by Christoph Huber in Cinema Scope 45) as breaking out from the German-language fare at last year’s Berlinale. In addition to being sharp, rigorous, and, to quote Charlie Kaufman’s mom, psychologically taut, [...]More →

By John Semley On December 8, Canadian filmmaker Reginald Harkema sent out an e-mail, received by colleagues, industry types, journalists, and others whose addresses he had accrued for one reason or another. Bearing the subject heading “Canada’s Top Ten,” Harkema’s e-mail contained the following brief message: I know Canada is not ready to fete a [...]More →

By Adam Nayman To begin with, a Gondrian image: a boy sticking his superhero doll out of the window of a moving car to create the appearance of flight. Thus does the first shot of The Green Hornet recall the opening of Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo (2001), with its action figures colliding in negative space, a [...]More →

Officials struggling to identify chemicals that forced evacuation VANCOUVER SUN—September 20, 2010 Health, fire and Vancouver city officials admitted Monday they are struggling to identify the chemicals emitting from the crippled Electra tower that forced the evacuation of the entire 21-storey building. As a result, it could be days before residents and businesses will be [...]More →

By Robert Koehler Hollywood youth comedy—that genre made for youths featuring youths—once the dream factory of a new wave of bright young things who were supposed to transform that end of the business over a decade ago, now resembles a stuffed doll mangled and torn to shreds by mangy dogs. Before the August arrival of [...]More →

By Adam Nayman “Did you notice anything suspicious?” asks a sign posted inside a ferry in The Ghost Writer. Well, of course you did: this is a Roman Polanski film after all, and the near-octogenarian auteur is peerless when it comes to grinning intimations of conspiracy. The film, which won Polanski Best Director in Berlin [...]More →

By Christoph Huber 1) Twenty-five years ago, a film by Joel Schumacher about young, self-centred, superficial people was greeted by mostly dismissive reviews: it was called St. Elmo’s Fire. 2) This year, a film by Joel Schumacher about young, self-centred, superficial people was greeted by abysmal reviews: it was called Twelve.More →

By Andrew Tracy There’s less Henry Hathaway than Robert Benton about Joel and Ethan Coen’s True Grit. Where Hathaway’s genial, serio-comic 1969 adaptation of the Charles Portis novel—about a headstrong, loquacious fourteen-year-old girl who hires a paunchy, drunken but ferocious U.S. marshal to hunt down her father’s killer—placed its lampooning/deification of John Wayne-as-Rooster Cogburn against [...]More →

Conventional wisdom says that a film festival jury should always have a talent spread; that is, a director here, an actor there, perhaps a critic or an academic or a programmer tossed in for good measure. This is because, as a rule, in every unscientific study ever done on the matter, directors and actors tend to select more conservatively, close to the mainstream, while non-filmmaking folk tend to lean more radicallyMore →